


Trompe-L'œil

by historia_vitae_magistras



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: FrUK, I'm so sorry for being like this, M/M, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, and in the ass, art references out the ass., but maybe there's just enough lyricism to redeem me, but poetically, enjoy, hopefully, the most pretentious of fruk fics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-23 14:12:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11404074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historia_vitae_magistras/pseuds/historia_vitae_magistras
Summary: And Francis understands, then, that he doesn't know at all.Oneshot. Complete.





	Trompe-L'œil

Francis doesn’t remember the first time he put brush to paper. He doesn’t remember the first whorls of paint or strokes of ink it might have been.  It might not have been a brush. It might not have been paper. It might not have even been something considered paint. It might have only been ochre. He might have ground it to powder and dissolved it in water. He might have breathed over his hands at Lascaux. He doesn’t know.

He only knows he does not have the answer because Arthur asks the question once. Francis doesn't remember when. It was after they'd rebuilt after the last war. Then, Francis was once again the shining pedestal of the arts and love in the world and Arthur a crumbled empire. But their people had been happy, inundated with a new and lasting prosperity. They had still looked to a better world under Alfred's steady gaze and deep pockets.

The day Arthur asked, they'd been together at one of those places where the clover didn't give way to the beach. One of those places where they could step from the green of the lawn to the blue of the sea without the grit of sand. Arthur like looking across the channel to Dover from that place in Calais. He remembers the endless clarity of the sea that day. The mass of the Dover cliffs there beyond. He recalls the fog parting to give them enough sun and warmth to shed their coats. He remembers laying down the blanket. He remembers Arthur dragging them both down with desperate hands. He remember's Arthur's eyes being softer than any of the greenery on Renoir's brush.

* * *

 

 

* * *

He remembers sex, softer than what usually passed between them and much, much longer. They were usually so desperate and urgent and quick. It was always a strange thing for men like them, with as much time as they.  

This time it is is gentle and tactile and rare. If it were a plant, it would be a fern, light and feathery and delicate; if a musical instrument, the long, high song of a viola. If a painting, a water lily by Monet. One of the more pastel renditions with different fractals of light as they sought out a shadow.  

* * *

 

 

* * *

He remembers holding Arthur under the long beam of the afternoon when they have come and gone. They're half asleep. Francis' arms around Arthur's chest and a leg between. Francis' had opened his eyes to his hands, pale in the wheat-gold of Arthur's hair. Arthur's eyes had closed; his face still flushed with the satiated pink of a man who'd made good on decades of desire. His collarbone blossomed in gentle purple smudges where Francis had anchored his kisses.

For the first time in decades, he didn't look like an old un-restored ancestor in a daguerreotype. The tarnished red and gunmetal pomp and faux-glory of the British Empire were gone. In its place, only England and Arthur. And Arthur, for once, is lovely. Francis rolled away. Arthur moaned. His face opened, content. And even with his crooked nose, thick boorish brows and too-large mouth he is resplendent.  

By the time Arthur had awoken, the sun was past its apex in the sky. As the hours had passed, the lines in the joints of Francis' hands filled in with charcoal. He'd etched Arthur in sharp curves and wispy crosshatched shading on several of the thick linen-pulp pages of the sketchbook in Francis' lap.

Arthur came to lazily, in stages of increasing awareness punctuated by his rolling over and burying his face into his arms. When he finally stretched and yawned and rubbed at sleepy eyes, he looked content and as happy as an Englishman ever could ever hope to. Francis greeted him with a soft smile. Arthur had suggested they eat. Francis agreed but in a little while. The light was ideal now. And so they had sat in that rarest and most peaceable of silence. As the sun had faded into the horizon in the deep reds and purples of a Bierstadt sunset, Arthur had gotten chatty again and asked a real question.

"How bloody long have you been doing that for now?"

* * *

 

 

* * *

 And Francis understands, then, that he doesn't know at all. He shrugs, and Arthur laughs. They clean up, button their shirts and straighten their trousers. Walk along the shore until they find a cafe where they sit and eat. They greet the blue dusk that seems formed from the same pallet as Moonlight on the River and Arthur looks content when they eat their scallops and sliced potatoes from white paper cones translucent with the oil. It's the way he does his fish and chips in London, Arthur points out. As if Francis doesn't already know. But it earns Arthur his faint smile, and they walk until the sun, and its light, are gone. He doesn't kiss Arthur goodbye on the docks. But he winks, and there's a naughty lilt to Arthur's farewell as he boards the last ferry of the night.

* * *

 

 

* * *

 

It's only later, when he's alone in his bed, that Arthur's question bothers Francis.

He knows it was before Latin landed on his Mediterranean shores with the legions and rounded the stony Gallic in his mouth.  He knows it was before Rome made him Gaul. He know’s it's within him to have created beauty since the definitions of humanity pulled him into existence. He doesn’t know if it was even Gallic between his lips. There might not even have been words yet created for speaking when human hands first found Lascaux.   

He’s been there before. Only once, sometime late in the Fourth Republic when his fury from the war had drained from him with De Gaulle. It was a single night. He did not like underground spaces anymore. Even the hedges of Normandy could make his skin crawl with the sensation that the world had closed off, trapping him in the tomb he had only escaped so many times. He’d chosen a night when there were no other visitors. Before the mould had set in and the conservateurs had shut the door to the public. The torch in his hand had lit the way through the clay hills from the road and deep into the cave system. Dimly, he remembers the cold, how much he despised being alone and underground since the trenches that had spliced him into slivers the first time the world had gone to war. What he remembers the most is the movement of things long since dead and forgotten.

The torchlight had flickered when he’d wavered. The wobbling light had set the world of paint and stone spinning and running and living. With the unfaithful shadows that flitted across the shapes, there had been life.

* * *

 

 

* * *

 The ancient menagerie had come to life. The bull, drawn in sharp, bold black lines, bristled with energy. The fur on the back of its neck stood on end, and the head turned to face him. He could almost see him snort and go to trample whatever had offended him so. A dun coloured horse, its belly swollen with an unborn foal almosts rears its head up. Deer were leaping, legs parted and near in flight across an unseen field. A bloody-minded auroch flung its twisted horns into the air. Two Bisons looking at each other and for a surreal moment, Francis can imagine both grazing. There are even cats, evanescent and graceful, watching from the world long since gone.

Matthew might tease him about the fine age lines in his face and the creaking that emits from his back on damn mornings, but even he cannot be old enough to have created such things. There faded colourless memories, faded with the ages. Things that might have come before Gallic and the Carnac stones but these cannot be his. They are his now, but he could not have been the soul to create such things. They are his because they are enigmatic, mysterious, beautiful things, not because he was a part of those who made them.

He had gone to leave. March out of this place and be content with this conclusion. But then he rounds the hall of the deer, and there is a single handprint of bare stone in a nimbus of red. He reaches up, and his hand fits. From the narrow of his wrist to the lengths of his fingers, the outline is perfect. There is a flash of his red right hand on the damp of grey stone. But he is older than Christ. And Mary herself knows that the age of Christ had brought just as much blood as it has paint.

 

He sleeps then, pushes the thoughts away to that recess of his mind that holds all such things that might keep a mortal man awake. He sleeps through the dawn of something new like he always will.

* * *

FINIS.

**Author's Note:**

> "a crumbled empire": By the 1950s-1960s the British empire had been dismantled piece by piece until little remained but the Commonwealth.
> 
> Lascaux: A series of palaeolithic cave paintings, found in a complex series of caves in the Dordogne region of southwestern France dating from about 20,000 years before the Common Era. A breathtaking sight of one of the oldest pieces of cave art by early man ever discovered.
> 
> Renoir’s "Paysage Bords de Seine: Now here is a painting with a goddamn story. This little napkin-size Renoir painting was bought for $7 at a flea market but only got there because it was jacked from a Baltimore museum in 1951.
> 
> a water lily by Monet: one of actually 250 oil paintings by Claude Monet. I chose this one because it's my mother's favourite and she painted a knock off of it that sits in my living room at I write this.
> 
> Bierstadt sunset: it's dramatic and actually by a German famous for painting Yellowstone.
> 
> Moonlight on the River" Lowell Birge Harrison: another one of my mother's favourites. deep, dark, almost melancholy blues that are somehow more vibrant than sad. her knock off sits in her living room and its bigger than the pictures of her first born. (me) :D
> 
> "scallops and sliced potatoes from translucent white paper cones:" From experience, Calais is surprisingly... British in a lot of ways. Influenced by their shared places on the channel, seafood is often served up fresh like this. Though in white paper rather than in newspapers as across the channel. 
> 
> Overall: France is an old ass country with a lot of old-ass art. It's a part of Francis and his history. He's just not sure how much is really his.
> 
> oh and the title, Trompe-L'œil: In the butchery of my Metropole in that is my Quebecois, this literally means 'deceived the eye' but technically is a kind of optical illusion. It's an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions. Here it is my metaphor that while France and England are flat things on maps and in their own fandom stereotypes, they are rich three-dimensional beings both geographically and as Arthur Kirkland and Francis Bonnefoy.
> 
> I'm on tumblr here: https://historia-vitae-magistras.tumblr.com/
> 
> I post history and Hetalia and aesthetics. 
> 
> Kudos, comments and critiques are life. Thank you for reading!!!


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